Second Best
by Great Gomerel
Summary: Post S3. In the wake of Ava’s departure, Addison helps Alex fumble his way back to reality. AddisonAlex.


"Second Best." Not mine. T/PG-13. Post-S3. In the wake of Ava's departure, Addison helps Alex fumble his way back to reality. Addison/Alex.

In this section: Addison copes with the results of her advice to Alex. Alex tries to figure out what went wrong.

(My attempt to figure out how these two pairings can coexist. For once, I'm not even going to claim full credit for any suckage. Any suckage is at _least_ 40 percent Ms. Rhimes' fault, for making psychological consistency for these characters an impossibility in my head. Grr.)

-----

When Alex rises from the pew, Addison fights the urge to burst into giggles. An inappropriate response to a _very_ inappropriate situation. Somewhere in the back of her head, she's aware that she ought to be feeling some sort of "psychic pain" right now—maybe not heartbreak, per se, but at least a little twinge of regret. And maybe she is. But mostly, she just wants to laugh.

She's always had a somewhat screwed-up sense of humor. You can call her Satan, but she _prefers_ to be called "Ruler of All that is Evil." You can say she brought ruin to her marriage, but she'll remind you that she brought to it a sparkling personality _and_ a futon couch, as well. And that old mess—the Derek and Mark and Meredith and marriage mess—is really quite pedestrian when you set it alongside her latest.

Because, um, she thinks maybe she's been spouting nonsense about not missing opportunities that could change your life. (Hello, Mark? And then Derek? And then Alex? Yeah, taking leaps is a _great_ idea.) She thinks she's been giving love advice to the guy she recently seduced who then crapped all over her hopes and sent her scrambling across state lines. She thinks—though she can't be sure and she's not quite ready to believe it of herself, yet—she _thinks_ she just told her intern to pursue their married patient. _Ha!_

Oh, she _definitely_ dreamed that. And she'd like to wake up now, thank you very much. The joke's getting old fast.

Forget Satan—you may call her the Fairy Godmother of Professionalism.

-----

Alex stares at the empty cot. He doesn't know when he fell for Ava. To be honest, he's still not entirely convinced that he has. If he thought barbecuing with Addison was a scary thought, he can't _begin_ to process the idea of a life with Ava. The estranged husband, the baby, the blot on his career? Those are nothing. What's _really_ scary is the disconcerting way that her attitude towards him reminds him of the Stockholm syndrome. It's the fact that he named her and picked out her face. It's the suspicion that she sees him as her savior. It's the fear that _he _sees himself as her creator.

At the end of the day, he's an ass and an egotist, but even _he_ feels a little uncomfortable with that.

But then there's the way she makes fun of him, and the way she calls him on his bullshit: "Did you sniff too much glue as a child?" And, well, she was _safe_, because she was a patient, and there was no way he'd pull an Izzie and fall for a patient, so he allowed himself to get close to her, to become friends, to _care_. He doesn't know when or how that changed. It's the Addison disaster, all over again: he didn't want to be "just another intern," and he'd thought he was above all that unprofessional crap. So he let himself piss off Sloan on her behalf and he told her he'd notice and he let her kiss him. But then it was too far too fast, and he pulled back.

This thing with Ava wasn't supposed to be like that. She reminds him of his sister. She yells at her people. She's a pain in the ass. Hell, she's spent the past month trying to set him up with Addison. He can't be in love with her. He just can't.

Half an hour later, Addison finds him standing there. His hand is on the frame of the bed; he's bent over, leaning his weight against it as though he's just had the wind knocked out of him. It's the same position he was in when Ava begged him for a reason to stay.

He's _hurting_: visibly, openly, unabashedly. And she does kind of hate him. She knows that "no" is supposed to mean "no." That's fine, and she commends him for it. But when she tells a man to stop flirting with her, when she tells him he doesn't _want_ her, he's not supposed to respond with a half-hearted "maybe" and then shut up. It's unflattering, at best. While she doesn't really recommend bad lines about tongues as an alternative, passionate kissing is generally a good start. And after the number of times she's thrown herself at him and made a compete fool out of herself, it's really the least he could have done.

But he's hurting. And she took a Hippocratic oath about that kind of thing. Whatever she is to _him,_ he is still someone she cares about. So, it's time to wave that tinsel wand. She tilts her head at him and flashes him a small, flirtatiously sad smile.

"Guess this means we're skipping the reception. Might as well grab a drink, as well?"

-----

Alex is good and drunk by the time they're locking the door to her hotel room. Addison is less drunk, because she's the designated emotional driver, here, and she has a history of bad alcohol-induced decisions. She's sober enough that she should really know better. But she witnessed a friend losing her last chance at motherhood, today, and that was her fault. She watched a wedding fall apart, and that was probably her fault too, for proposing to the groom in the middle of surgery. Today's not her best work. Honestly, at this point, she can't bring herself to care.

So what if he doesn't want her. She wants _him_, and hey, it's not like she's hasn't slept with him before. Sleeping with him again will add very little to her list of sins. (He's joined Mark on the list of available manwhores.) Plus, he's in pain, and she's gotten used to looking out for him, and sex is supposed to heal, right? (Forget getting thrown out of the house, and being abandoned at prom, and having "You're not my girlfriend" thrown in her face. _Other_ people say that sex heals, and she believes them.) Besides, he's hot, she's hot, and they're hot together. She's got _needs_ and a post-modern feminist mentality. God helps those who help themselves.

Alex doesn't think this is the greatest idea, but he figures he's done with "thinking" for today. Addison's the boss; it's her job to steer them in the right direction. Sure, she's not Ava, but she's _here_. She's not married and he hasn't changed her bedpan and when he's mean to her she sometimes runs away—but she always comes back. Most importantly, though, he didn't have to invent her. She's _Addison_, and the things he knows about her are things that she revealed to him herself: he doesn't have to tell her who she is. She doesn't _need_ him. So he can screw her now and it will be "awesome" and in the morning he'll brush her off and thank her for helping him cope with the loss of another woman. And she'll accept it and still let him scrub in with her, because lashing out at work would be _unprofessional_. Being a good mentor means something to her.

If it were possible to love two women at once (or any at all), he'd maybe confess that he loves that about her.

The kissing is frantic, and she's pretty sure he just ripped her tweed Dolce & Gabbana. (The suit is an improvement on the scrubs, but she likes him naked even better.) Hurry or not, he still stops long enough to undo her hair, which she finds vaguely amusing. _Men and long hair_. Now he's pawing at her clumsily. She's normally pleased when men pay attention to other areas, but she doesn't want either of them to have time to change their minds, so she bats his hand away and yanks his pants down. _Do_ _it, now,_ her expression orders him. Well, he does what he's told, when she's doing the telling.

In spite of her efforts to accelerate the process, he's surprisingly gentle when he enters her. His movements are slow and careful, and he looks her straight in the eye. It's… unexpected. But when she returns his gaze, those are beads of sweat at the corner of her eye, not tears.

If she didn't know better, she'd be tempted to think that he _cared_, or something.

-----

When Addison wakes around two, she thinks she heard the word "Ava." But that kind of thing only happens in the trashiest of romance novels. Even Derek "Christmas Spirit" Shepherd had the decency not to name Meredith when they were in bed together. A small line of light from the street has snuck in, and she looks over at the man beside her. Alex's eyes are screwed shut tightly so that the skin around their sides puckers. His breathing is quick and shallow. She decides she must have dreamed it. (Her subconscious is a crappy author.) It doesn't matter, anyway.

Still, she lies awake for at least another hour.

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A/N: God, I wish I were capable of thinking outside the Canon Box. "Fairy Godmother" inspired by a TWoP post (can't remember whose).


End file.
